Summer Camp

[thom]

On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Edwin Pilobello wrote:

> Of course it's going to be fun!  Sometimes it's hard fun. 
> 
> The hat trick is inspiring them to create a design document. Double the
> difficulty level for OOD.

start out with anything by Scott McCloud. Maybe show them 'ghost World' or
'from Hell' and explain storyboards from that perspective. they will get
it immediately and then you explain that the 'comic' also needs notes for
all sorts of sounds and interactivity. If they are real young maybe start
them with 'Miss Spider's Tea Party' which is a great picture book and then
show them the Cd which was created from the Book. there is a great
storyboard/design doc example for Ludtke's Bad At The Midway. Lots of
stuff on Gamasutra.com. Maus, the book, and Maus the Cd is pretty good.
Show the movie Final Fantasy, the book 'The Making of' and then run the
game on a PS2.

I have done this with kids from 10 to 50; age almost doesn't matter. I
have tons of this stuff from my grad students and find that I can take a
grad design doc and show it to kids 15 and up and they get the idea and
will create a document as good as the grad level document.

I get them to run ideas by giving them index cards and limiting them to 50
word ideas with 'no names', very important that no one can be identified
when running ideas. Shuffle the deck, break them up into groups of 4-5 and
tell them you want the 1 good idea in the pack. Some will come back with
1, some with more than 1 and some with none. You do this two days in a row
in the morning and by the 3rd day 2-3 of the kids will be coming in with
bunches of ideas. Figure out if the idea is a story or an interactive.

Make them show at the end of the camp to mom & dad and any one you can
round up. 

--Thom